Always drink plenty of fluids in a location at least a quarter mile from the nearest bathroom.

During your morning and afternoon commute, walk from one end of the streetcar to the other and back again until you reach your stop. Don’t forget to say “Excuse me” to the other passengers.

Visualize yourself as fit and healthy. Studies have shown that self-delusion can be as effective as exercise in raising your self-esteem.

Read only heavy hardcover books.

Buy a piece of expensive exercise equipment from a store near you and carry it home. The next day, carry it back to the store for a refund. Repeat until you are banned from the store; then find a different store.

Remember to fidget while you watch the television.

To make sure you get your full measure of exercise every day, assign some of it to the servants.

…that, if all the toilets in North America were flushed simultaneously, it would lift the continent by five feet?

…that the city of Portland, Maine, is the only city in the United States named after itself?

…that, as part of an elaborate experiment designed to prove the hypothesis that professional journalists have no longer memories than mayflies, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has succeeded in planting the same psychic-dog story over and over again for decades?

…that, in the entire record of classical history, and up to the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, there is not one recorded mention of a T-shirt with a slogan printed on it?

…that Leonardo da Vinci, for all his brilliant accomplishments, could never quite get the hang of charades?

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

MY COUNTRYMEN:

When one surveys the world of today, with its prophets of doom and its indifferent masses yearning to eat chocolate, he can, if he is male, or she can, if she is female, hardly fail in her, or perhaps his, contemplation of the spectacle to note the one glaring injustice which remains to be unglared.

Liberty—by which I mean a freedom of action within the constraints of a due observance of all applicable regulations—and civilization are inseparable. Yet, until this day, liberty has been denied entirely to one class of persons, on no other pretext than a mere physical difference.

Eightscore and nine years ago, my predecessor Abraham Lincoln ended the practice of enslaving millions of Americans on no other grounds than the color of their skin. Some time later—indeed, only a short time before I occupied the White House for the first time—the Nineteenth Amendment granted the right of suffrage to the female half of our great nation. It was my great pride to have been the first President summoned to the White House by the votes of both sexes, and in the short time allotted to me by fate I did my best to return my gratitude to the female voters on an individual basis.

Yet now, after so many advances in equality, the Dead citizens of our country, who probably make up an absolute majority of the population, have no rights whatsoever. It would be no exaggeration, I fear, to say that, once a citizen has passed into a deceased state, our government begins to treat that citizen as if he, or perhaps she, no longer existed. In many districts even the right of voting is denied to the Dead, although I am pleased to say that this is by no means the case uniformly across our fair land.

But today, with our new administration, a ray of hope shines for these cruelly neglected citizens. As they look to Washington and see one not unlike themselves standing, or as it may be sitting, in the Oval Office, they can be assured that my first priority will be to relieve the senseless discrimination that has oppressed them for so many ages. My second priority will be to find someone to vacuum up all the dog hair in here. This I plight to God and country.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Click on the image to enlarge it.